1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of information security, and more particularly it is in the field of security systems for use in complex business processes such as contact centers and other customer service applications.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
When the contact center industry first arose some forty years ago, security was a relatively straightforward matter. The technologies in use were analog telephones and text-based computer terminals for the most part, and all of the customer service representatives who might interact with customers (and thus be exposed to sensitive customer data) were generally employees and were centrally located in secure facilities. Data was generally stored in very secure mainframe computers. In this early contact center industry context, the primary security threat to consumer data would have been the employees, and this threat was not serious. The employees did not have access to computers at home, nor to the Internet, and there were no small, easily-concealed devices capable of storing large amounts of data. And since employees' only contact with computers was likely to be with the remote terminals in the contact center where they worked, the level of sophistication in computer technology of the employees was generally low (so the risk of customer service representatives' “hacking in” to the mainframe to steal consumer data was minimal and easily mitigated). And, a much smaller proportion of consumers' economic activity was conducted using credit cards in the early days of the contact center business, compared to today. Online banking was unheard of forty or even twenty years ago. In short, there was less data to steal, and it had less value, and it was harder to steal.
Today's customer service contact center environment offers a stark contrast, in terms of securing sensitive data, to this simple situation of years gone by. Today, virtually every customer service representative (or “agent”; throughout this document the term “agent” will be used to refer to customer service representatives generally) will have computers at home, and will be computer literate. Agent turnover tends to be high, and many agents are very technically savvy, as they have grown up with computers, unlike the agents of the early days in the contact center industry. Readily-available technologies that make it possible to record and conceal large amounts of data, such as flash memory sticks and the like, make it easy for technically knowledgeable agents to gather data and remove it from secured facilities with ease. Because most transactions conducted by consumers involve credit cards, debit cards, online banking, ecommerce, or some combination of these, essentially all consumer economic activity creates exploitable and accessible sensitive data. And, since the telephony systems used by contact centers tend to be tightly integrated to the computer systems, since sensitive data is often stored on many servers, and since agents work with fully-functional computers rather than terminals in most contact centers today, whatever data passes through a contact center tends to be much more accessible to agents than ever before.
To complicate this already much more severe situation, the related trends of outsourcing of contact center operations including agents, offshoring of technology and people, and utilizing home-based agents means that much of the technology and many of the people involved in delivering customer service from large enterprises to consumers is potentially not even under the control of the enterprise. Enterprises must rely on security programs of their partners, and these programs must deal with the difficulty that more than one of their enterprise clients' data is moving through their contact centers. This last detail adds a new dimension, because now it is important not only to make sure agents or hackers do not steal sensitive data, but also to ensure that data of different clients is not commingled. These challenges are exacerbated yet more by the rapid emergence of “cloud computing” platforms in which large server farms making extensive use of machine virtualization technology operate complex applications on behalf of (and usually under the control of) numerous independent clients, many of whom compete with each other.
In some cases, home agents are used to conduct customer service operations. Often these home agents are employees of the enterprise providing the customer service. In other cases, they may be employees of an outsourcer that provides contact center services on behalf of an enterprise. And in yet other cases, home agents may be independent contractors, making money by working part time as contact center agents from home. As with the outsourcing arrangement, these home agents may provide services to more than one enterprise, making the data commingling challenge relevant. The computers used by home agents are sometimes owned by the agents' employers, but in the case of independent contractor home agents, the computer is owned by the agent and is not under the direct control of any enterprise's information security tools, programs, or policies. Clearly the challenge of ensuring the security of sensitive consumer data in this environment is much more complex and daunting than the security challenges faced by early contact centers.
Finally, when dealing with home agents, and especially those who work casually or part time, there is a new privacy issue raised that is simply not present in centralized contact centers (whether an enterprise's own centers or those of an outsourcer). The privacy of the home agent also needs to be protected, at least when the agent is not working on behalf of an enterprise. That is, it is fine for an enterprise to monitor calls to a home agent that are taken on behalf of that enterprise, and for the same enterprise to monitor keystrokes of the agent during these calls (and any wrap-up work following these calls). But it would be inappropriate for the same enterprises to monitor calls that are either for another enterprise or not part of the agent's work at all (in many cases, the same phone is used for personal calls and contracted customer service calls). Currently available systems provide an all or nothing approach, for example by having a dedicated phone line only for business use (difficult to enforce), or running business calls through an intermediate point under the control of the enterprise and only monitoring calls passing through that intermediate point (effectively thereby only monitoring business calls; however, this approach still does not solve the problem of commingling when more than one enterprise uses the same outsourcer and the intermediate point is under the control of the outsourcer).
Another, related problem faced by enterprises in the art today is the control of tools and capabilities needed by agents to perform customer service functions. Agents not only have access to important consumer data, but also to the enterprise's own proprietary data and systems. For instance, in a common scenario, home-based agents working part time take direct response calls from consumers who have viewed, for example, a television infomercial and wish to consider buying the advertised product. The home agent typically must have access to pricing information and to transactional systems in order to carry out the desired sale. Pricing data, and data about promotions that are in place or that are upcoming, is very sensitive, and it is desirable that home agents only have access to that data as they need it, with no ability to copy it. And in some cases enterprises may want to ensure that certain tools used by agents are only available for valid business reasons, rather than for personal reasons. For example, in a ticket-selling scenario, it might be important that the agent is only allowed to sell tickets to valid customers calling in and pre-screened by an interactive voice response (IVR) system; it would be important in these cases to prevent the agent from selling tickets to family and friends while they have access to the tools. Again, the emergence of cloud computing complicates an already challenging situation, because the tools provided for use in service of various clients may themselves be cloud-based, “hosted” applications operated by independent third parties.
Another problem common in the art, and made worse by the widespread adoption of home or remote workers, is the problem of safeguarding sensitive customer data that is stored in call recordings or other recordings of activity such as application steps taken during customer interactions. These recordings are commonly used in the art for quality monitoring and training purposes. Increasingly, quality-monitoring personnel may also be home-working independent contractors. And training is often performed online, especially when training home agents. In these situations, call recordings (and related recorded data) may be viewed by people who are not under the direct control of the enterprise, and who may be using computers not under the control of the enterprise's information security programs and policies. While it may be desirable to manually edit such recordings to remove sensitive data such as credit card and social security numbers, this approach has at least two serious problems. First, the cost and limited scalability of such manual methods makes them unattractive for most applications. Second, in many cases it is legally or contractually necessary to retain a complete recording of every call. Complete recordings may be needed for evidentiary purposes, dispute resolution, employee disciplinary actions, or legal records of authentication or transactions (in health care and securities industry, for example).
It is an object of the present invention to provide a more effective security management system for complex business processes by addressing many of the problems just described.